Dating
She canceled plans the night before. Something came up, she said. You said no problem and made other plans. A week later, in a different conversation, she mentioned that you hadn't tried to see her when she canceled. You thought you were being easygoing. You were failing a test.
The test was real. The grade counted. The rubric was never shared.
The game
She wants to know how you'll actually behave: under pressure, when she's unavailable, when there's an attractive distraction, when something small goes wrong. Direct questions don't give her that. People answer the way they think they should. Observed behavior in a real situation tells her something questions can't.
So she creates situations, or uses existing ones, and watches. She introduces you to her attractive friend and tracks how you act. She picks a minor fight to see how you handle conflict. She cancels plans to see if you'll push back or accept it. Each scenario has a right answer (hers) that she hasn't shared.
You're being evaluated on a rubric you've never seen.
The equilibrium
The test persists as a strategy because covert observation is genuinely better information than self-reporting. People behave differently when they know they're being watched. The methodology has real validity.
The problem is the asymmetry. She's making real decisions about the relationship using information you didn't know you were giving, on criteria you can't adjust for. You can't study for an exam you don't know is scheduled.
Dominated strategies
Trying to intuit what the test was and retroactively pass it is the dominated strategy. You'll either guess wrong or tie yourself in knots behaving in ways that feel unnatural.
The better move is to behave consistently whether or not you think you're being observed. Not because it guarantees you'll pass (her criteria may not match who you are) but because inconsistency is the only thing that fails every version of every test. If you behave differently when you think you're being watched, you're giving her exactly the information she was looking for.